Thursday, November 29, 2007

I guess not so many readers of this page are into Godzilla movies. Your loss. Anyhow, the book about Eiji Tsuburaya consumed most of my working hours for the past five years and it's not right to exclude it from my work as a writer. It really is a groovy book.

ANYWAY, I've been thinking some about silence lately. I started to say this at my last talk at the Hill Street Center. But I wasn't in the mood that day to get too deep and "spiritual" so I don't think I conveyed the idea very well.

Simply put, my feeling is that the silence that underlies zazen practice is always available. In fact, this profound and mighty silence underlies all of our experiences -- from a long day of zen practice in a noble temple, to a KISS concert at Cobo Hall in Detroit circa 1977 (Love Gun tour, my favorite era), to a torrid night on the windswept dunes with the object of your affection bathed in silver-blue moonlight, to an afternoon cleaning up shit off the bathroom floor when the toilet has overflowed. Every experience rides atop an ocean of deep, deep silence. So deep and so silent you could never touch bottom. It makes the little bubbles and flotsam floating on its surface seem so insignificant they hardly matter at all. And yet though they (we) are just temporary shapes thrown up out of that endless silence, they (we) are made of nothing but silence. As silence we are endless, without boundaries, without names.

A lot of times people approach Zazen practice as if they have to forcibly generate silence into being. I've followed that rewardless path a hundred thousand times. But there is no need to try and create silence. It's always there, always flowing through you, creating you and creating the world that surrounds you. All you have to do is to allow it to be what it is.

Silence is never apart from you. It supports you through every experience. It carries you like a mother carries her child, protecting you from all harm. Silence is the strongest thing there is.

When you sit, don't worry if inner thoughts intrude or if outer disturbances interrupt your futile attempts to overcome them. Just allow the silence that manifests as every distraction to be what it is. Including your distraction at being distracted. It's all nothing but silence forming itself into temporary shapes. No matter what comes up, just return your attention to the silence that underlies everything.

58 comments:

I would have to say that the thing that I enjoy most about reading you blog is the bouncing back between the sacred and the profane(and I do understand that those are loaded terms). Sometimes the profane gets too much for me ( buttwipe, for example ), but that MAY just be the point.

I may have written this before, but the one thing that has kept me going with sitting is your comment that zazen is boring (LA Yoga interview, I think). With my limited experience so far, I have to agree. So I keep telling myself that I am doing it right. And to keep doing it.

"Is the silence you're talking about here the same thing as 'emptiness', as in 'emptiness is form'?"

That's a great question. Soundslike it might be, this silence hardly every comes up for me, to many images running through my skullet, though when this silence shows itself I enjoy for as long as it stays which is not long!

Now this has got to stop. Either you're a mind-reader, or you've been hiding behind the curtains at the zendo on Sundays where I go to sit. Because this is almost EXACTLY what we talked about last week after zazen. Hell, it's nearly word for word.

I'll say here what I tried to say last week - that getting a glimpse every now and then of this silence (I called it calmness) in the midst of otherwise frenetic activity is what drew me to this practice. I certainly had no desire to get involved in or join a Zen Buddhist group. I just wondered where my calmest, sanest, clearest moments came from and wanted to know how to extend them or expand them.

That's it.

Several years later, prodded largely by HZ, Brad's first book, I find myself sitting zazen daily and reading things like this and going "Yeah, that's right. I don't know what it means exactly, but it's right." I don't think we create calm so much as notice it. I think it becomes easier to notice if we steep ourselves in it, like tea.

And since my analogies are getting worse now, I'll just be silent myself. :-)

Cometboy Said:"I would have to say that the thing that I enjoy most about reading you blog is the bouncing back between the sacred and the profane(and I do understand that those are loaded terms). "

I actually had to read. "The Sacred and The Profane" by Mircia Eliade for World Religions this semester. Don't read it unless you're really into the religious impact that the structure of your house has. Seriously.

I know this is the superficial aspect of what Brad said, but can people with tinnitus ever experience the silence of the universe?

Hello Brad,I DO like Godzilla-movies. What about 'Godzilla - Giant Monsters All-Out Attack'? That's a great one with Mothra and King Ghidorah; last one lies somewhere hidden in an ice-cave, an old Budhistlike bloke comes along and sees it shimmering in the dark...it's f*** great!Anyway...yes silence...I agree, it's there all the time, but...it's getting cloudes sometimes. My trick? Pause for one minute during your daily activities (apart from sittin in Za-Zen which I do too of course), look around, smell, listen, touch; where am I, how's the sky looking (strange, purple fuelled clouds, a plain coming out of the distance etc. etc.). It keeps me alert and 'here and know' to please all you Eckhart Tolle-fans out there!Keep up the good work Brad.

Did you mean to say that you have to stop being a pretentious fuck yourself, or that mysterion should stop being such a pretentious fuck? I don't think you consider yourself pretentious, so I am going to assume that you merely forgot a comma in exhorting mysterion to shut up.

More than 100,000 marchers flooded the streets of Caracas yesterday to protest against proposed constitutional changes that would dramatically widen the powers of President Hugo Chavez.

As polls predicted an agonizingly close result in Sunday’s referendum, legions of protesters stormed along the Venezuelan capital’s central avenue, blowing whistles, waving placards and shouting “Not like this!”

Some taunted "Shut up!" echoing a outburst by King Juan Carlos of Spain at a recent summit, which has become a popular ring tone among students.

But Mr Chavez vowed that a march by his supporters, scheduled for today, would see Thursday’s turnout tripled. He has described his fresh-faced rivals as “daddy’s little children”, “fascists; and “the children of the rich”, accusing them of acting on orders from the US Government.

Nice read.I lately experienced the "silence' while sitting in Zazen. It feels like you stand still, no time, no sound, being in a vacuum; that is what NOW is. Our mind is just to busy making stuff up constantly to creat stuff and make th NOW more interesting.

But NOW is over the top cool and a source of tremendous well being if you can manage to step outside your mind.

Love how you bring Buddhist/Zen into this century and add the Zeitgeist which traditional "Buddhist". Not to say the old wisdom has no value, hey we wouldn't be here without it! But to move things in this times you need to talk in a way most people get it, not just the "exclusive club members" ... Love your SG article!

Good luck transforming out of your old job/working life into a new one. It's always exiting to start new in life :))

It's true that silence is the root experience of our being. And once it is recognized it is very easily experienced again. And it's certainly a lovely experience, which is untouched by any mental or environmental noise.

But it would be all too easy to stop there and think that that is the end. That is the danger of beautiful experiences.

Mysterion said..."au contraire(on the contrary) The entire Universe - as we know it - 'rings' at 3 degrees Kelvin. It is a very BIG bell and a very LOW frequency - but never silent. It is just far beyond our perception....Thus, silence is an aspiration, not a reality."

If the Universe and Mysterion are always ringing, then what sound does a half period or aperiodic sound wave make?

A translation of the Kalama sutra,(a must read)."...Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience.Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many..."

Thus, voiceless consonants in speech have no fundamental frequency. Although no glottal striations or are visible on a wide-band spectrogram and no glottal harmonics are visible on a narrow-band spectrogram the encoded speech is still decodes by the listener (within the same dialectical culture).

This helps explain the L&R and B&V jokes in the Ural-Altaic Language group. See Grimm's (of folklore fame)

often an unsettled person throws their disturbance into many crashing crescendos into the silence like the pause between bomb blasts just so we'll know that he knows the why where when how what of silence.

the turn from inhalation to exhalation.

does mysterion know this is hardcore zen blog not mysterion blog bombardment?

Anony said:"I would say, no. I know people with tinnitus and they go through hell at nigh. they cant sleep cos of the ringing."

I actually have moderate tinnitus, and it can be very distracting at times (trying to fall asleep, sitting, etc.) It's worse when I sleep because the point of zazen is to just let everything be, but the point of sleeping is to SLEEP :-)

The very odd thing is that, since I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, I only have a conceptual understanding of what silence is (since to me, silence is a ringing.)

Professor Mysterion went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen. The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. "It's overfull! No more will go in!" the professor blurted. "You are like this cup," the master replied, "How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup."

Interesting blog reminds of a contractor I worked for his pet- peeve was no one was to step on his shadow anytime he was around-it was considered an insult.So we had to position ourselves with our backs to the sun when he was in the AiREiA.But about this silence/emptyness is not a empty glass in need of a fullness-a shadow in need of sun light so by being silent are you in need of noise then the silent becomes fullest and is in need of empty like a dog chasing its tail when he catches it he is no longer chasing it so we need it -concept-to be broken and not work this is true silence.